Lois and I enjoy watching many of the series on television. They stream on Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney +. Our favorites include a few from PBS, such as Downton Abbey, Poldark, Bridgerton, All Creatures Great and Small; another one is the eighty-nine episodes of Everwood on Amazon Prime, or more recently, the six season British investigative series, ‘Unforgotten.’ I read the other day that season six of ‘Unforgotten’ has received harsh criticism over the advocacy of certain political views. Viewers have used social media to make their opinions known. Some support the series; others offer criticisms. I surmise that this latest season has left certain fans frustrated and disappointed, accusing the show of focusing too heavily on “woke” themes at the expense of its central crime narrative. The backlash comes after season six started on February 9, and introduced multiple contemporary social issues, including immigration, racism, asylum seekers, online misogyny, disability, and far-right media rhetoric. One critic penned: "I was a fan of each previous series. 2 episodes in and I'm finding the political commentary way too much. I think it detracts from the story and makes the whole thing less credible."
However, responding to the comment, creator and writer Chris Lang lamented: "Sorry to hear that, I like to hold up a mirror to the UK, and reflect where we are."
That is not a terrible thing to do, is it? I think we should hold up a mirror to America, and let the image presented at that moment reflect where we are.
In my last post, I mentioned the ‘dust-up’ caused by J.D. Vance, a recently converted Catholic, with Pope Francis over the Trump administration’s deportation pogrom. Vance’s defense employed an ill-informed and decidedly disputed explanation of “Ordo Amoris.”
Vance’s conflict with the Pope started in January, when the Catholic Conference of Bishops raised objections over Trump’s plans to round up and deport millions of undocumented and as it turns out, even documented citizens, including from places of worship. In an article for USA TODAY (January 26, 2025) titled “Look in the mirror: Vance knocks Catholic organizations for criticizing Trump’s immigration policy.’ Sudiksha Kochi, the report’s author, quoted Bishop Mark J. Seitz, chairman of the Catholic Conference’s migration committee. Along with the voices of other Catholic groups, Seitz wrote in a Thursday statement that “non-emergency immigration enforcement” in sensitive areas like places of worship are “contrary to the common good.” He went on to write:
Turning places of care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need, while endangering the trust between pastors, providers, educators, and the people they serve, will not make our communities safer.
Then, on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ host Margaret Brennan pressed Vance on whether he supports conducting raids or other actions at church services or in schools. Vance responded antagonistically saying:
I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?
Rather than respond to the question, of course, Vance predictably attacks and insults the humanitarian integrity of the Catholic church. A month or so later, Pope Francis needed to correct his contemptible defense of his immigration policy by referring to a mis-informed and self-justifying ‘Ordo Amoris.’
As Americans, as Christians, as people of faith, we must look in the mirror and take more seriously and look more critically at what we see and who we are.
I am reminded of the words of James in his epistle to Jewish Christians who were gathered throughout the Greco- Roman world:
22 But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23 For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves[a] in a mirror; 24 for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25 But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
(James 1:22-25, NRSVU)
George Yancy, a professor of Philosophy at Emory University, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on February 9, 2017. Although it appeared eight years ago, the column might very well have folded seamlessly into its pages this month in 2025. Given the fact that the Trump administration has barred federal departments and agencies from acknowledging so called Identity months, which includes Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian American Pacific Islander Month and Pride Month, the title, “Its Black History Month- Look in the Mirror,” it bursts forth anew with relevancy and a sense of timely urgency. The paragraph below is an example of each:
On paper, America stood for freedom. Yet that freedom was denied to black people. White America, white people, lived in a profound form of what Sartre called “bad faith” — a state of inauthenticity and self-deception. The white social critic Lillian Smith (1896-1966), who grew up in the Deep South and later wrote “Killers of the Dream,” observed, “I had learned that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that we might have segregated churches.” She also noted, “I learned it is possible to be a Christian and a white Southerner simultaneously” and “to pray at night and ride Jim Crow car the next morning, and to feel comfortable doing both.” It is this bad faith, this ethical perversity, that haunts the history of white America.
And as Frederick Douglass noted, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
I remember reading an article by David French, the New York Times columnist. It was posted on December 26, 2024, the day after Christmas. For that reason alone, it caught my attention. The title of the article was: Why are so many Christians so cruel? His opening lines are alarming, to say the least.
Here’s a question I hear everywhere I go, including from fellow Christians: Why are so many Christians so cruel?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard someone say something like: I’ve experienced blowback in the secular world, but nothing prepared me for church hate. Christian believers can be especially angry and even sometimes vicious.
French has just followed up that article with another disheartening observation about Douglass’ widening difference between the “Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ.” In his NYT op-ed, Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy (February 13, 2025), he opines:
The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.
Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.
Yet now the focus of the Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are ‘woke’ or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.
…hard-right Christians began to turn against the very idea of empathy. Last year a popular right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, published a best-selling book called “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” This month, a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
How is one to respond to that idea? The sin of empathy, Really?
If there was ever a time for Americans, Christians, and people of faith of all kinds to look in the mirror, it is surely now and to do so with a sense of compulsory urgency.
Let me close with two questions that are not mine but have remained with me since I first read them in a piece by David Brooks, which appeared in the Atlantic, August 2023. Under the title How America Got Mean? Brooks writes: In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. He asks two questions:
First, why have Americans become so sad?
Second, why have Americans become so mean?
His answer:
… healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that makes them grow unkind.
As a nation and faith community, we need a good “look in the mirror” moment, and ‘on going away,’ we must not forget what we saw in our faces and in our society, a sad and lonely and demonstrably unkind people. Do we truly lack empathy for all the fearful and vulnerable, the poor and marginalized, those on Medicaid, and most provocatively, as Bill Gates predicted yesterday, the many millions of children all over the world who will die because of cruel, immoral budget cuts? Is having empathy a sin? We need to look in the mirror and behold the shameful and defining difference between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ. The former is more political than Christian. The latter is what Christ models and teaches us in scripture, hoping that we will seed and tend to what is sown, growing a healthy moral ecology.